The Body as Sensible Transcendence: Embodied Flux and Sacrifice in Caryl Churchill's The Skriker

Ebrahimi, Nastaran; Bordbari, Zahra; Sharif, Negar

doi:10.22034/ijpie.2025.556234.1157

The Body as Sensible Transcendence: Embodied Flux and Sacrifice in Caryl Churchill's The Skriker

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Nastaran Ebrahimi

Zahra Bordbari

Negar Sharif

Department of English Language, Faculty of Foreign Languages, CT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

10.22034/ijpie.2025.556234.1157

Abstract

This article examines Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker to theorize the destabilization of the liberal humanist subject through the intertwined concepts of sensible transcendence and the hysteric subject. It argues that the Skriker, as a shape-shifting, cross-gendered entity, materially embodies Luce Irigaray’s notion of sensible transcendence, reconceiving transcendence not as disembodied escape but as an emergent process rooted in corporeal difference and intercorporeal flux. Simultaneously, the Skriker’s fragmented language and protean identity perform the role of the Lacanian hysteric subject, exposing the economy of sacrifice inherent to liberal and neoliberal orders, which demand psychic fragmentation and the abjection of non-normative identities for their reproduction. By placing Irigaray’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological frameworks in dialogue with psychoanalytic theory, this analysis demonstrates how Churchill’s dramaturgy uses the Skriker’s radical embodiment to subvert hegemonic gender binaries, challenge patriarchal symbolic structures, and render visible the psychic and social costs of a system sustained by sacrificial logic.

Keywords

Field

Sensible Transcendence

Hysteric Subject

Economy of Sacrifice

Embodied Flux

Subjects

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